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Hybrid Cloud? It's About Choice.

Even if you’re not a technologist, I want you to understand that hybrid cloud computing is all about choice:

Choice about where your data resides. Choice about how your data is managed. Choice about where your data processing actually happens.

Choices can be used:

to make economic decisions to lower the total cost of ownership of data,

to maximize your quality of services, or

to comply with regulatory constraints on data sovereignty.

In today’s environment, vendors are moving fast. If we wind the clock back a year, the main cloud services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon, Terremark, or Rackspace were fairly proprietary, closed environments. But they all quickly realized that IT heterogeneity is what customers want.

Customers Want Choice, Not Monolithic OptionsManaging a mix of platforms is a reality for CIOs’ deployment models. And ultimately, that’s what the cloud is: It’s a deployment model.

If I take my infrastructure and my workloads and move them to the cloud, my ability to do so in a closed, homogeneous cloud is very limited.

It’s the transportability of workloads that makes the hybrid cloud so important. Terremark, Rackspace and Amazon have visions to make this happen: To seamlessly transport workloads, so it doesn’t matter where your workload resides—whether it’s on premises or in the cloud.

Three years ago, this was called cloudbursting. This idea stalled and fizzled because the technology hadn’t arrived. But now we’re able to seamlessly transport workloads and data across multiple clouds: Public and private.

Amazon is just starting down this path—where you can submit a workload to a queue and Amazon will understand your needs for specific types of storage, compute cycles, and memory. Amazon will also give you some options for creating this cloud environment.

These options may include a priority queue where you pay extra and move to a higher priority. But if you’re okay with waiting a few hours and don’t mind the workload being run somewhere else in the world, then you’ll be charged a different fee.

In the past, high-performance computing was physically located on-premises. But with the cloud, you remove the sunk capital costs. Instead, you get on-demand access, paid for based on the urgency and priority to your organization.

Not Everyone Has A Supercomputer In The Basement A few years ago, I was working with a company in Boston doing human-genome sequencing. This is the perfect example of the value of big data, because it’s going to affect you and me as human beings.

To run a simulation of genomic sequencing data, this organization needed time on the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, one of the fastest computers in the world at the time.They actually had to physically travel to the machine’s location and wait for processing time to become available.

Now, fast forward to the present: You can contact Amazon or Rackspace, who now have this type of computing capability, and you can rent the time and processing power. This really illustrates what cloud computing is all about.

I can now offer that Blue Gene machine to someone who wants to access it for a little while, in the cloud.

How Do SAP And NetApp Fit In? Wind the clock back five years: SAP had less focus than today on the type of server or storage our software was running on.

But that’s all changed: SAP is now focused on the infrastructure, middleware, database, BI and application business. The release of SAP HANA two years ago, plus the purchase of Business Objects and Sybase support this change of business model.

We have over 2,500 SAP HANA customers today. Those customers are demanding high-performance database analytics in their traditional database store.

NetApp is now in a truly unique position. It has the ability to manage across multiple heterogeneous storage formats and the ability to provide high-performance data access across all those different formats.

This is very important (IT people get very excited when you start talking about merging online transactional processes with analytical workloads, which tend to be deployed under different storage and file configurations).

These Changes Are Bringing A Tectonic Shift And it’s all being driven by hybrid cloud computing. From the business perspective, it’s the route to a seamless, data-centric world.

Things that were limited by on-site physical capacity and storage behind my four walls are no longer holding us back. Suddenly, I’m only limited by my imagination and my ability to build the business.

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I was lucky enough to be part of a presentation day from a SAP manager in my school last year where the new hybrid model of database architecture system was introduced to us in the context of a discussion about SAP and innovation. SAP HANA is a step forward for database systems. Combining HANA with existing technologies can revolutionize the way we do things, business-wise. “Things that were limited by on-site physical capacity and storage behind my four walls are no longer holding us back. Suddenly, I’m only limited by my imagination and my ability to build the business.” All said!